As many as 206 boys, aged between 8 and 13, were detained for nearly seven hours on Tuesday at the Cantonment railway station in Bengaluru after police were led to believe they were victims of human trafficking, IANS said. The Railway Police Force, who suspected the children were being trafficked from Assam and neighbouring states, let them off after verifying their identities.
“On a tip-off by a fellow passenger, we asked all the boys and their 20 teachers to alight from the Guwahati Express at the Cantonment railway station and kept till evening to verify their status,” IANS quoted an unidentified RPF official as saying.
The boys were returning from their Ramzan vacation, The Times of India reported. The teachers and their students were confirmed to be from madrassas in Karnataka. The boys were residents of Assam, Bihar and West Bengal and had moved to Karnataka for their schooling, IANS reported.
The group arrived at the station on Guwahati-Bengaluru Cantonment Express at 12.30 pm on Tuesday. The last batch of students was let off only after 7 pm. The verification process took long as most of the children did not have proper identification documents. Several officials from the Child Welfare Committee also gathered at the railway station.
“They were travelling in four groups from Guwahati,” S Ravi, additional commissioner of police, told Bangalore Mirror. “We found nothing illegal with them and returned from there.” The boys were studying at madrassas in Tumkuru, Shimogga, Sagara and Madikeri, among others.
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